How to Identify and Meet Your Audience’s Needs in a Website Redesign
Having an extensive understanding of your brand’s target audience and their pain points is a crucial component in creating a customer-first website.
In a recent virtual event Rise hosted, we asked attendees what their biggest challenge is in launching a website redesign—the most common response was about understanding the target audience. We consider this an essential step in any redesign process; knowing who your website needs to reach and assist is important for envisioning what it should look like and how it should operate.
Julia Fitzgerald, Chief Marketing Officer at American Lung Association, shared the company’s journey with Rise of building a best-in-class website. American Lung Association came to Rise looking for a data-driven rebrand of their website that would need a tailored experience for each of their constituent audiences. In the beginning of the project, we utilized several methods for gathering information about these audiences and their needs.
Identify the Audience Segments and their Motivations
American Lung Association serves multiple groups ranging from the general public to healthcare audiences and beyond. Each of these groups have different motivations and needs when visiting American Lung Association’s website including volunteering, donating, sharing their own story, finding events, or becoming an educator. Documenting these nuances provided the necessary foundation for creating a memorable and fulfilling experience for all visitors.
Gather Data and Survey Employees for Intuitive Navigation
To understand the journey that visitors took when browsing online digital content, they referred to the company’s legacy website and Google Analytics data to uncover the page pathing per each audience segment’s needs. Rise's development team also surveyed American Lung Association employees who offered their insight on the organization's audience.
Design with the Client’s Mission in Mind
Ultimately, Rise was able to design a new website that brought warmth and emphasized the humanity of the brand, while also making popular areas of the website such as Lung Health & Diseases, Research & Reports, and Policy & Advocacy easier for viewers to access. One notable change was the redesign of American Lung Association's donation page. Rise developed a more colorful interface with lifetstyle imagery to provide a feeling of compassiton, and ultimately create a stronger bond between the donor and the association.
Taking the time to understand your brand’s target audience is one of the first steps to redesigning a website. Performing this prework will not only give your company a better insight into who you are targeting, but help you improve customer experience for years to come. For more guidance on how you can consider your audience’s needs in a website redesign, reach out to Rise.